Poems from the far side of belief, memory, and loss.
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After the Body
They are no longer here
in the way we understand here.
Something has loosened.
Not vanished.
Not gone.
Only released
from the form that held it.
What we called a life
gathers itself differently now.
It is not upward,
not elsewhere.
It is a change in pressure,
like air after a storm,
when everything is the same
and not the same.
We try to follow.
We imagine distance,
arrival,
some field where all is made clear.
But what if it is closer than that.
What if it has not gone far enough
to be named.
A warmth remains
where a body had been.
A shape in memory
that does not stay still.
You feel it sometimes
without warning.
Not as grief,
but as a shift.
As if something were continuing
without needing you
to understand it.
We want an answer.
Instead we are given
this movement.
This quiet rearranging
of what was certain.
And the sense,
not provable,
not finished,
that nothing has ended,
only changed its way
of being held.
Convocation
I stood in order, having arrived late.
Not late by the clock,
But by the long detour of damage, work,
And the slow revision of belief.
The hall had heard this before.
Brick remembers.
Names are spoken.
Hands are shaken.
Time registers the event
And continues without comment.
I wore the costume of arrival.
The square cap rested where uncertainty
Had rehearsed its arguments for years.
The robe concealed nothing
But implied gravity,
Which is what ceremony does when meaning is thin.
I had come by way of music, archives,
Margins filled with doubt,
Questions that refused applause.
Nothing about this was efficient.
Nothing about it was young.
The mind arrived only after patience
Had exhausted resistance.
Around me stood others,
Each bearing an invisible history
Polished into composure.
We did not look victorious.
We looked complete enough to stop.
Some were absent.
Their absence took up space.
It required no explanation.
Memory arranged itself accordingly.
This was not triumph.
It was recognition.
That time, applied steadily, alters a person.
That attention outlasts faith.
That endurance leaves a residue
Which we agree to call knowledge.
The ritual ended.
The doors opened.
The city waited, indifferent and intact.
I stepped out not renewed
But adjusted.
Less interested in arrival.
More capable of remaining.
After Certainty
I walked once where everything agreed,
or seemed to.
The light fell cleanly on what I believed.
Words followed easily.
I spoke them as if they had weight.
It is possible
I mistook ease for truth.
Nothing announced the change.
No voice, no sign.
Only a small resistance
in things I had already said.
A hesitation.
I began to notice it in others first.
A phrase too certain.
A laughter that closed rather than opened.
A silence where something should have answered.
Then in myself.
I found I could not repeat
what I had said before
without hearing it
as if spoken by someone else.
Not false, exactly.
But no longer mine.
There was a moment
I might have turned back.
Left it there.
Let the surface hold.